KUCHING: Alcatel, the seventh largest phone manufacturer in the world, is focusing its efforts to regain its market share in Malaysia with better phones while carrying a less-taxing price tag.

“Alcatel is one of the biggest phone manufacturers in the world, the seventh biggest in fact. The company’s One Touch range is Alcatel’s attempt to crack the smartphone market,” highlighted KL Kong, country manager for Alcatel One Touch, a company of TCT Mobile Malaysia Sdn Bhd yesterday during the launch of the Alcatel’s One Touch Idol X.

Kong explained that despite the Malaysian market being muscled by brands like Samsung, HTC and Apple, Alcatel is still very much a pronounced player in the region.

“In places like the Philippines, Alcatel is outselling major brands like Samsung, so regionally we’re still a big player,” the country manager enthused.

Alcatel is now aiming to regain traction in the country with a five per cent market share target by end of the year.

“Thus far, we’ve had very positive response from the end consumer about our products.”

Touching on the success of the product overseas, Kong as well as Steven Tan, chief executive officer of Ten Ten Telecommunications Sdn Bhd noted that there was no exact unique selling point that the company was hammering on.

Rather, the company would try to meet certain demands based on the country they are targetting.

“Competition is everywhere but at the moment we’re trying to ‘sweep’ the local needs in terms of product specification and pricing strategies,” they explained.

“In other regions, we’re working very closely with operators to help expand our brand, we liaise with other channels to gain distributors and of course we also try to further enhance our brand online.

“In terms of features on our phones, i think we’re no less than the big players but we’re pricing our products at a more competitive range than our competitors.”

Kong also explained that Alcatel has been working closely with certain government programs to further their brand.

“Locally, we’re also working closely with the government on programmes such as the PKB programme whereby phone buyers under a certain age earning under RM3,000 will be eligible for RM200 rebate. Just like how we’re doing it in other areas (working with operators), we’re also working very closely with DiGi Malaysia to help distribute our phones to the market.

“At the moment, we’re using our own strengths to gain the branding back via different channels and we’re hoping to gain back the name we had before.”